Month: September 2004

Flickr


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originally uploaded by minusbaby.

Just testing out the Flickr service. According to Flickr:

Flickr is the best way to store, sort, search and share your photos online. There is a huge mass of photos in the world, and Flickr provides a way to organize yours, and for you and your friends and family to tell your stories about them.

It also allows you to post to your blog entries about your’s or other peoples’ photos.

I’m not too sure if I’ll end up using this since I’ve already got my own gallery, but its always fun to play around with this stuff.

The Weekend

Tony and Ed at the Glebe Record FairI enjoyed this weekend greatly. I think it was the first time in about two months where I really had the weekend to do what I really wanted to do. No being sick, no worrying about work, no family engagement. Just me, me, me.

On Friday night Rozie and I headed into the City and met up with Thommy and the crew to celebrate/mourn him finishing up his current job. Ate too much at Chinese Noodle Resturant, then off to drinks at the Soho bar. There were some truly munted guys in there at around 11pm. Too early for that kind of thing. One of the guys kept falling asleep on Justine and Rozie and occasionally muttering “Youse guys are bloody legends”. After that we headed to Candy’s Apartment for Boogiedown. It was OK to start with, but by the time we left at around 2am, the music was a tad meh.

Saturday morning was spent celebrating Benn’s birthday for brunch at Campari in the City. Happy birthday for Sunday Benn! After that Rozie, Matt and I headed down to the Glebe Record Fair to pickup some bargains. Tony, Ed, Simon and Quest were there getting rid of some of their unwanted records. I managed to pickup a couple of old Chicago tracks, a Paul Hannah EP on Ferox, an Imagination EP and something else. Rozie dug through the crates a lot harder than me and only made it to about two stalls before her money ran out. She managed to find plenty of bargains.

BJ, in tight tracksuit pants

After that we met up with BJ (in some very tight trackies), Cuts, Thommy and Teresa for our lunch (their breakfast) at Mint in Surry Hills. Its the first time I’ve eaten there, and it was great. I had a fantastic beef salad with pine nuts and eggplant. After that we went home and I watched Takedown, which is the movie of the story of Kevin Mitnick. It was super-corney with PC laptops making Macintosh noises, funky graphics popping up on screens that usually aren’t there, and nerdie hackers having sex while their boxes are getting 0wned. After that I watched Spike Lee’s 25th Hour which was fantastic. Not too sure of the last 10 minutes. BJ reasoned with me that with was a nice way to finish it since Edward Norton’s character looked like he had nothing to look forward to for the whole movie, and this was perhaps something to counterbalance that.

After I dropped Rozie at her relaxation seminar at Sydney Uni, I spent sometime shopping in Bondi Junction Westfield, which seems to have doubled in size since I went there earlier on in the year. And they still don’t seem to have finished the place. I ended up buying some goodies for Rozie and I bought myself a pair of black Adidas Superstar Dboss‘s with the Adidas logo embossed into the leather in a pattern like the Gucci print. Yay, what a weekend.

Pervasive Tiles

Pervasive Tiles

As part of a design competition over at designboom, Caleb Fung has come up with a networked tile system. The tiles has embedded cabling which then join up with other “node” tiles which have functions such as lighting, heated tiles, flat speakers, LCD panels, outlets and dimmer switches that allow you to adjust brightness, warmth, and volume.

Apparently this is just a concept at the moment. Here’s hoping that it will be commercially produced at sometime. If I ever have my own place I’d love to have these!

Here is a great mockup for the potential applications of the Pervasive Tiles.

via: we make money not art

epsxe + linux

I’m currently trying to get epsxe running under linux (Fedora Core 2) at the moment with no luck. I’ve checked out somethings which are supposed to make it work, but to no avail. 🙁 Anyway, it starts loading the game and then segfaults. 🙁

* Running ePSXe emulator version 1.6.0.
* Memory handlers init.
* ePSXe: PSX BIOS loaded [/home/common/emu/psx/bios/scph5500.bin].
* Loading ISO Format [BIN/IMG2352] ok
* NTSC cdrom detected.
* Init gpu[0][libgpuPeopsSoftX.so.1.0.16]
* Open gpu[0]
* Init spu[0][libspuPeopsOSS.so.1.0.9]
* Open spu[0]
Segmentation fault

Update: Maybe I’ll have to check out this ePSXe on Linux howto when I get home. (ref)

Remote syslogging

Today I was setting up centralised syslogging at work to some plain old syslogd server. I’ve only really setup up centralised syslogging with syslog-ng before.

Anyway, in the syslogd man page, is said to send the syslogs of a server to both the central syslog server and locally, with entries like this in /etc/syslog.conf:

*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none /var/log/messages,@hostname

For some reason that didn’t work at all. Depending on how I did it, it either only went to the central syslog server, or it just wouldn’t log at all. I ended up having to do it like this:

*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none /var/log/messages
*.info;mail.none;authpriv.none;cron.none @hostname

I managed to find that piece of information on the LinuxSA mailing list.

2 Years

Well yesterday Rozie and I celebrated the 2nd anniversary since we got married. I can’t believe its actually been two years. It seems like ages ago since we went and celebrated our first anniversary at harbourkitchen&bar. To celebrate, we had dinner at Luke Mangan’s Salt in Darlinghurst. Managed to pile in 4 courses which included oysters with soy, leek & wasabi dressing, quail tempura, goats cheese stuffed tempura of zucchini flowers, filled with goats cheese & green olives, beef with porcini curd, Rozie the mint crusted breast of guinea fowl dish for main and we shared a warm chocolate tart that just beautifully melted everywhere for dessert. It was nice, made even better by turning off the phone and ignoring my calls from the helpdesk until I got home 😀 (Thanks go out to my oncall backup though…)

Update: Mel informed me that perhaps I should be saying that time has gone quickly since Rozie and I have been married. Thanks Mel 😛 It seems like ages, because time has gone so quickly… 🙂

New Dark Comedy album coming

Dark Comedy - Funk Faker

Update 30/09/2004: Looks like they’re back in again.

Update: Looks like all the copies over at Disk Union are gone

Oh, and it looks like its already available in Japan.

DARK COMEDY-MUSIC SAVES MY SOUL

SELF-OBSESSION, it’s the 21st century epidemic. M-m-my generation has become the me-me-me generation and reality has become a TV show which turns our next door neighbours into stars that flicker and die in the blink of an eye. It’s Warhol’s fifteen minutes reductio ad absurdum, Alice navel-gazing through the looking glass. And while our cathode ray icons relentlessly chant “mirror, mirror on the wall …” the myth of Narcissus – condemned to waste away adoring his own image – seems entirely apposite.
Continue reading “New Dark Comedy album coming”

OpenPower

Yeah, baby. Got to get me one of these sweet IBM OpenPower servers. OK, I know, they’re pretty much a pSeries without the AIX license, but hey. Its niiiice. Now I can have a 64-bit Power series CPU machine without having to pay any money for an AIX or OSX license.

I do wonder whether this server without the AIX license is a response the ongoing SCO vs IBM nonsense

Vapourous

Reading this article over at Wired makes me all sentimental. It reminds of when I first started buying Wired, and when I first started working in IT. Everything felt so new, exciting and crazy promises like being able to run any application on any operating system on any hardware platform with very little overhead, like Transitive Corporation are promising with their QuickTransit “hardware virtualization” product.

I’ll believe it when I see it…

Stateless Linux

This sounds interesting, Stateless Linux.

the goal: a uniform framework to cover all common ways of instantiating a centralized OS install read-only on multiple physical or virtual computers

This could be great for some of the server environments we have here at work. The IBM blade servers come to mind immediately for me, but I guess it doesn’t need to be just for that. Anyway, here’s the fedora-devel-list announcement, a proposal PDF document, a How To and some rpm packages.

Dreams

I’ve been having quite a few dreams lately which feature people who I used know or were friends. The thing that bothers me is that I’d rather not dream about them. I really wish they’d stop bothering me and let me sleep in peace. Is that too much to ask?

The Donnie Darko soundtrack you want to buy but can’t

From Art of the Mix via Beta:

  1. Echo & The Bunnymen – The Killing Moon
  2. INXS – Never Tear Us Apart
  3. Tears For Fears – Head Over Heels
  4. Pet Shop Boys – West End Girls
  5. Duran Duran – Notorious
  6. Steve Baker & Carmen Daye – For Whom the Bell Tolls
  7. Joy Division – Love Will Tear Us Apart
  8. The Church – Under the Milky Way
  9. Tears for Fears – Mad World
  10. Gary Jules – Mad World (cover)

A collection of all the 80’s songs that weren’t on the original Donnie Darko soundtrack.